


Death Walks With Him

by AngelSelene



Category: Gundam Wing, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Canon Ships - HP, Creator Chooses Not To Warn Due to Spoilers, Implied/Referenced Sex, M/M, Master of Death Harry Potter, Relationship hidden for spoiler, reader discretion is advised but not expected
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-04
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-17 05:54:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29837013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AngelSelene/pseuds/AngelSelene
Summary: “Who are you?” Harry demands. “What are you doing here?”The boy pulls a foot up and wraps his arms around it, watching Harry with amusement. A curtain of light brown hair tumbles around him, but his eyes… they’re old. “You know who I am,” the boy says.“No, I don’t,” Harry says harshly. “And you shouldn’t be sitting on Professor Dumbledore’s grave!”The boy doesn’t laugh, but his eyes sparkle with amusement. “We’ve met, Master. Don’t you remember?”Something inside Harry viscerally revolts at anyone calling him “Master,” even in such a playful tone.“I’m no one’s master!” he snarls in reply.“Oh, but you are,” the boy says, and if Harry thought so before, he’s sure now that while this… person before him might look like a boy, a child, he is not. “You, child, are the first to hold all my gifts since I brought them into this world to give to your ancestors. My stone. My cloak. And my wand,” he says, and Harry feels the Elder Wand virtually hum in his pocket. “You have mastered my Hallows, and so, you have mastered me. You are the Master of Death, Harry Potter.”
Comments: 16
Kudos: 89
Collections: Bringin' Gundam Wing Back





	Death Walks With Him

Harry stands at Dumbledore’s grave with the white marble gleaming in the sun.

“I wondered how long it would take to get you alone,” a voice says. Between one blink and the next, a boy is sitting on the tombstone. Harry can’t tell how old he is, maybe ten? Maybe twelve? Maybe older. He’s lean to the edge of gauntness, dressed all in black, his face heart-shaped, and eyes almost too-large for it. Those eyes are entrancing, purple, like the purest purple crayon in the box, and even among wizards, it’s not a color Harry has ever seen.

“Who are you?” Harry demands. “What are you doing here?”

The boy pulls a foot up and wraps his arms around it, watching Harry with amusement. A curtain of light brown hair tumbles around him, but his eyes… they’re old. “You know who I am,” the boy says.

“No, I don’t,” Harry says harshly. “And you shouldn’t be sitting on Professor Dumbledore’s grave!”

The boy doesn’t laugh, but his eyes sparkle with it. “We’ve met, Master. Don’t you remember?”

Something inside Harry viscerally revolts at anyone calling him “Master,” even in such a playful tone.

“I’m no one’s master!” he snarls in reply.

“Oh, but you are,” the boy says, and if Harry thought so before, he’s sure now that while this… person before him might look like a boy, a child, he is not. “You, child, are the first to hold all my gifts since I brought them into this world to give to your ancestors. My stone. My cloak. And my _wand_ ,” he says, and Harry feels the Elder Wand virtually hum in his pocket. “You have mastered my Hallows, and so, you have mastered me. You are the Master of Death, Harry Potter.”

A fine tremble starts in Harry’s hands and he tightens them into fists to control it. “I’m no one’s master,” he says again.

“Then give my Hallows back, and you will be master no more,” the boy says.

“I won’t give them to anyone,” Harry informs him. “No one should have them.”

“Not even Death?” the boy asks.

“How do I know you are what you say you are?”

The boy lays his head against his knee and smiles. “You _know_ , Harry Potter.”

Harry hates when people say his name like that—like it’s a title, not a name.

“I don’t know anything,” he says firmly. “You need to leave.”

“So you can bury my wand with its previous master?” the boy asks. “It won’t change anything, you know. You are its master now. Refusing to use it, to lay claim to it, will not make it less yours. You are the Master of Death. It will not bend to a new master while you live.”

How did the boy know what he was planning to do with the Elder Wand? He doesn’t want it, can’t bring himself to break it, doesn’t know if he could if he tried, but he can’t just leave it somewhere for someone to find either.

“Decisions, decisions,” the boy singsongs, not quite a child’s mockery, but it hits Harry in the same place that Dudley’s taunts did.

“Leave!” he commands.

The boy tips his head in a facsimile of a bow from his position and says, “As my Master wills it.”

Harry blinks, and he’s alone again with Dumbledore’s tomb. He pulls out the Elder Wand. It’s warm and right in his hand, perhaps even _more_ right than his phoenix-and-holly wand, but he will never admit that to anyone.

The boy knows what Harry had planned. Resigned, Harry puts the Elder Wand away and walks away from the tomb.

* * *

Harry tells no one he still has the Elder Wand. He casts a powerful concealment charm on it and keeps it with him, though he never uses it. He doesn’t see the boy for many years.

Not until he’s chasing down a Neo-Death Eater—one of a new cult trying to resurrect Voldemort and his ideals—years later. He’s been separated from his partner, but that’s hardly surprising. Few partners have managed to keep up with Harry over the years, and he kind of expects it at this point.

He doesn’t know what happens in that split second, but he doesn’t manage to dodge the Avada Kedavra coming at him, and as it does, time seems to pause.

The boy is there again, unchanged, as ageless and unaging as when Harry saw him on Dumbledore’s tomb more than twenty years before. He strolls lazily around, then reaches out to run his fingers through the trail of green death magic before Harry can voice a warning.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” the boy asks, petting the magic that hangs in the air almost as if it were a cat. “Death magic.” He meets Harry’s eyes and grins. “But I may be biased.”

“You—”

The boy hums, continuing to pet the magic, eyes never leaving Harry’s. “Yes, me,” he says. “You stand in Death’s path, Master of Death, and yet you seem so surprised to see me.”

Harry swallows, thinking of Ginny, thinking of his children, thinking of Ron and Hermione and the Weasleys, and all the people he loves and is going to miss.

The boy stops petting the magic and walks over to Harry. Somehow, Harry is surprised when he raises Harry’s left hand, and holds it out toward the spell. It’s close enough for Harry to touch now.

“Why do you fear the magic?” the boy asks as if genuinely perplexed.

“Because I don’t want to die,” Harry tells him, as if the answer should be obvious.

“But you are the Master of Death, Harry Potter. You have nothing to fear from magic borne of me,” he says, and pulls Harry’s hand forward till it touches the spell.

It seems to dance along Harry’s skin like a puppy pleased that its master has come home. It feels happy and playful, and for the first time in Harry’s life, it is beautiful. It turns from poison green to a vibrant violet, and Harry doesn’t throw it so much as stop holding it back.

The woman screams and falls, and time starts running at a normal speed again. Harry feels a vague brush that he has come to associate with someone dying, and he runs toward her.

“Potter!” Silverbane, his partner, calls.

“Here!” Harry calls back, looking down at Angelica Witherstorm’s dead body. A pool of blood is slowly spreading from where she hit her head when she fell, and in other circumstances, that might have been enough to kill her. It is what the official report will say, after it’s investigated officially, as all such deaths are. But Harry knows it’s wrong. Angelica Witherstorm was dead before she hit the floor, and in death, she looks oddly peaceful.

The last spell Harry cast was a repelling charm; the last spell Angelica Witherstorm’s wand cast was Avada Kedavra.

* * *

The peaceful look on Angelica Witherstorm’s face haunts Harry, which is why he finds himself in the Godric’s Hollow graveyard after midnight when he should be in bed with his wife. He’s been there for more than an hour when he finally says, “Come out! I know you’re there!”

Between one blink and the next, the boy is sitting on the tombstone of Harry’s mother, looking bemused again.

“You need only call me, Master, and I will come.”

“What the hell happened there?” Harry demands. “With the—and the—”

“I told you, Master. You are the Master of Death. You have nothing to fear from magic borne of me.”

“You keep telling me that—that I’m Master of Death. But what does that mean?” Harry doesn’t mean to whine, but he hasn’t felt this frustrated and out of the loop since he was a child and Dumbledore was hiding things from him.

“Ah,” the boy says. “Finally questions.”

Harry paces, agitated. “Ever since I saw you, I can… _feel_ when people die. I know when someone has died somewhere recently. I can _feel_ the way the seasons change, and I mentioned it to Hermione thinking it was just a magic thing, and it is _definitely_ not. And now—” He cuts himself off, flinging a hand out, mimicking the way he had held the death magic in his hand days before. “What was that?” he asks plaintively as he drops his hand.

It is a new moon, and the graveyard is very dark, yet Harry can somehow see the boy as perfectly as if it were the height of day.

“You are the Master of Death,” the boy repeats. “That means that you have power over Death itself. You exist outside of normal reality—you walk with one foot in _my_ world, always. That is why you feel a soul’s passing when they die, why you know when someone has passed and rippled the veil with their leaving. With your touch in my world, you feel the world die in fall and sleep in winter, and you feel it shudder back to life in spring. Some wizards and witches can sense it, but they don’t tap into Death to do so—they tap into _Life_.”

Harry pushes his glasses up and runs his hands over his face. “Why me?” he asks. “Why is it always me?”

The boy—Death, Harry supposes—shrugs. “Most are born to be changed by the world. A few are born the ability to change it. You are one of the latter.”

“So, fate,” Harry says, angry and disgusted all at once.

“Yes,” Death says. “And no. We roll the dice, my sister and I. Not all who are born with the ability to change the world do so. Some come back to me before they can do what they might. Some find joys in smaller changes, in smaller things. Some, by their sheer ambition, can cross the barrier. It is not set in stone. It never has been.”

“So it’s all a game to you?” Harry demands.

Death raises an eyebrow. “Just because I come before you in human guise, do not think that I am human. I am Death, Harry Potter. I have always been, and I shall be until I reap my sister herself, and then, and only then, where there is no Life left, shall I finally find peace. A mortal life is less than a blink to me, and yours is only interesting because you, Harry Potter, of all lives that have ever walked this plane, you alone do I call Master.”

“I didn’t ask to be.”

“And yet you will not give me my wand and relinquish your hold over me,” Death says. It could be an accusation, but Death says it with nothing more than idle curiosity. Harry pulls out the Elder Wand and holds It in his hands. He wants to thrust it at Death, tell it to go away, but he also is afraid. Afraid that if he does so, Death will take its wrath out on him, that freeing Death from him will be as good as committing suicide.

“If I give you the wand, will you swear to—” Harry stops, trying to work out how to frame it so that Death can’t wiggle out of it. Hermione is so much better at this shit.

Death laughs. “I make no bargains, Master. Do not try to wheedle one out of me. If you give me my wand, then you relinquish your power over me and are as mortal as any creature ever born.”

Harry startled. “I’m… not mortal?”

“You are the Master of Death,” Death tells him. “How can I touch you when you command me?” he asks.

Harry isn’t sure if he sits down or falls down, but he’s on his ass and he thinks it was at least somewhat intentional, since the landing didn’t hurt.

Death props his chin in his hand and smiles. “I did wonder how long it would take you to notice.”

“But… I’m getting older…” Harry protests.

“Are you? Still? Are you sure? It seems to me you are at the height of a quarter-century’s vitality and have not moved from that moment since.”

Harry looks at his hands, but they’re simply his hands and he can’t see it.

“You are a wizard, and those of magic age slower than those without, but they will notice at some point. At some point, your wife’s red hair will turn gray and yours will be as it always has been. Your children will be mistaken for your siblings, and perhaps, one day even your parents.”

“Wait,” Harry interrupts. “If I’m the Master of Death, I can make that stop. I can protect them.”

“You are my Master,” Death says, but there’s warning in his voice. “You can force or stay my hand at your will. I recommend you be freer with forcing my hand than staying it though,” he says. “I am Death. But aging is part of Life. It is not something I have dominion over. So while you can stay my hand and keep your wife and your children alive for centuries— _millennia_ —if you so desire, be aware that it may be no kindness you do them. Men were not meant to live so long.”

“What about the Flamels?” Harry asks.

Death grins, the kind of grin that a cat that catches the canary might wear, and says, “They were tricky, I concede. But even they passed into my hands nearly twenty years ago, and their elixir is no more.”

“Someone created it once. Someone must be able to create it again,” Harry says.

“Of course,” Death says, but he seems unbothered by the prospect. “But in the end, I will come for them too. They delay the inevitable only.”

Angelica Witherstorm’s peaceful face flashes across Harry’s memory.

“The Killing Curse—what did I do to it?” he asks.

Eyebrows raise, Harry belatedly notices that Death has an oddly animated face. “When?”

“When you came to me—I… I caught it and made it something else. What did I do?”

Purple eyes become contemplative. “The woman who wrought the Killing Curse did so by touching my realm, harnessing a tiny bit of the veil. That is a terrible thing, a horrifying thing, and so, to die in such a way leaves its horror imprinted on its victims,” Death explains. “But you are the Master of Death. The one living creature in all the universe who has the _right_ to touch my veil and my world. Where the Killing Curse tears at my veil, you left a mere ripple, a waft. It’s a gentle death, the new spell you’ve wrought.”

“I don’t know how to do it again,” Harry says, feeling sick. “I didn’t even give it a name.”

“It needs no name for no one else could wield it. You are the Master of Death and so you may wield me and my realm freely.”

Harry shakes his head vehemently. “No,” he says, forcing himself back to his feet. He pulls out the Elder Wand, which seems to tremble, as if excited by its true master’s proximity. After a moment, he stomps forward and holds it out toward Death. “Take it back. I don’t want it. I don’t want any of it. I don’t want to be anyone’s master. I certainly don’t want to be yours! And I don’t… I don’t want this power. Humans shouldn’t have it.”

He holds his arm outstretched, but Death does not take the wand that is freely offered, instead watching Harry with thoughts Harry can’t guess at.

After a long moment, Death puts a hand on Harry’s fist and pushes it back toward him, gently.

“It is yours by right, Master,” he says softly. “And I do not think this is a decision you should make under stress. Once returned, you are mortal, and I cannot give you safe passage.”

Reluctantly, Harry drops his hand to his side. He understands what Death is saying—that once he gives him the wand, Death is all but promising he will die. It seems only right, after he had been Death’s master, that once freed, he would exert his will over Harry.

Harry has faced Death countless times, but he isn’t ready to die, so he puts the wand away.

As the years pass, Harry questions that decision many times. But he never offers it again.

* * *

Harry does not look for Death, does not seek him out, but he isn’t surprised to see him when someone dies. He works enough murders and has enough cases where a suspect dies that he gets used to seeing Death around. Over time, he learns to tap into the death magic gifted to him as the Master of Death. He learns to feel out how recently someone died, read the emotions they felt before they died. He can’t summon the dead or speak to them—Death explains that he is the keeper of the veil. Once he has taken someone, they move beyond his reach. Death cannot bring people back. The magic wrought in the Resurrection Stone is as close as Harry can get, and that remains a shadow. 

By the time he approaches sixty, Harry has learned to use powerful glamours to make him look like he’s aging. Death teaches them to him, teaches him the _real_ power in the Elder Wand—neither Dumbledore nor Grindewald nor probably any other owner who had ever held the wand knew of its true power. Or maybe, maybe it’s just because Harry is the Master of Death that he’s able to unleash its true power. Either way, he learns to weave glamours that would make the fae seethe with envy.

He doesn’t use the Elder Wand unless he absolutely has to. He still loves his phoenix-and-holly wand, but it seems with every spell he casts with the Elder Wand, his beloved phoenix wand seems to lose just a hint of luster, a hint of compatibility. Wandless magic almost seems easier sometimes.

For some reason, the keeping of the Elder Wand and what it means to be Master of Death are secrets Harry never shares with Ginny. He can’t explain it, other than no one who has ever owned the wand has come to a good end, and something about its power is seductive. He loves Ginny, but he can’t risk her mentioning the wand to anyone. He even tells Ron and Hermione that it’s hidden, secret, untouchable.

And then the test comes.

It’s a freak accident—Ginny has been a professional quidditch player for decades, and while she’s getting a little old at sixty-five, it’s not _old_ yet, not for a witch.

Except a bludger bat breaks mid-match and the shrapnel catches Ginny in the thigh. Ginny doesn’t seem to think much of it, no one really does. The thick robes and padding of the equipment hides the amount of blood she’s losing, not until she has to land in the middle of the match. Harry _happens_ to be there—he rarely makes it to her matches because of work, but he just _happens_ to be there that day.

As soon as Ginny lands, Harry sees _him_ with her.

He doesn’t even think, just reacts. One moment, he’s in the stands, the next, he’s holding Ginny in his arms, and she’s pale, so _pale_ , no one should be so _pale_. Her robes are soaked with her blood.

“Harry… I don’t feel good,” she says.

“Hang on, Gin,” he says, pressing his hand to her thigh, trying to find the wound. There’s yelling around him, and Death stares down, the first expression of—not sorrow, never that—but pity perhaps? Something soft and odd on his features, and it’s not an expression Harry has seen, and he knows he never wants to see it again. “Save her!” he demands, heedless of the people around them. Harry calls on all his magic and tries to heal the wound, but he has never studied healing magic, and he remembers too late that he is the Master of Death, not Life.

He can feel Ginny’s soul losing its grip on her body, and he stares at Death and demands, “Don’t take her!”

The soft, unnamable emotion leaves Death’s face, replaced by sense of perpetual amusement as he raises an eyebrow. There are people around them, but Harry doesn’t care about them, doesn’t care what they think, what they see, if they think he’s crazy. He just doesn’t want Ginny to die.

“Is that a command, Master?” Death asks.

“Yes! Yes, damn you! That’s a command! Don’t you dare take her!”

“You may not thank me for—”

“Ginny is not dying today!” he insists.

Death inclines his head. “As my Master wishes,” he says.

* * *

Ginny does not die that day.

She should have.

Her femoral artery had been severed, she lost too much blood, far too fast. Even with magic healing the wound and replenishing her blood, the damage is done. Her brain and organs were starved of blood for too long, and they’re all shutting down. The mediwizards can’t even explain how she’s still alive, but she’s braindead. Even magic can’t bring that back.

Their kids come, James with his wife, Lily with her husband. Scorpius is a mediwizard at St. Mungo’s, so he is there helping treat her. It had taken time, to love Scorpius, but Albus loves him, and that had eventually won the rest of them over, and now Harry is trusting him to be honest about the state of his mother-in-law. Their grandchildren are brought by as well, but Ginny is unresponsive.

Three days after the accident, Scorpius stops by when Harry is the only visitor left.

“How’s Albus?” Harry asks, not looking at him. It’s still hard to look at Scorpius and not see his father, not see his grandfather. He is a very different man than they were, but right now, in this time and place, Harry’s heart is looking for someone to lash out at, and he will not make his son-in-law a victim of his impotence.

“He’s… focusing on the kids,” he says. That makes sense. That’s how Albus deals with stress—by taking care of others, by focusing on others. He’s a caretaker at heart and always will be. When he can’t deal, he pours his energy into others.

“I know what the other mediwizards are saying,” Harry says. “If I were anyone else, if I weren’t _Harry Potter,_ what would you tell me?”

He can sense Death hovering in the room, but he’s staying out of Harry’s line of sight, so Harry can ignore him.

“They’ve already told you she’s braindead, Harry,” Scorpius says, not cruel but not pulling the punch either. “Her soul is somehow clinging to her, but she’s gone.”

“How long can she go on like this?” Harry asks.

He hears Scorpius sigh. “The spells can keep her alive indefinitely,” he says.

“But?” Harry prompts.

“But she’s not going to get better, Harry,” Scorpius says, gentle but sure.

The silence is nearly deafening. “You’re saying we should take her off the life support spells,” Harry spells out.

Scorpius sighs again. “Yes. If it were my mother or father, then yes, I’d recommend ending the spells.”

His regret and sorrow are nearly palpable. Scorpius gets along much better with Ginny than he does with Harry—through no fault of his own. Despite what Lucius Malfoy’s actions once did, she doesn’t see as much of him in his grandson as Harry often does, even though the resemblance is purely superficial.

“Good night, Scorpius,” he says by way of reply.

There’s a bare hesitation, then Scorpius says, “Good night, Harry.” The door closes softly when he leaves.

Harry grips Ginny’s dead hand between his own, feeling sick. He can sense her soul, sense the way it’s virtually fighting to flee her body, on the edges of his senses, he feels how trapped it feels.

He swallows. “If we stop the life support spells, how long could you keep her alive?” he asks.

Death moves around, sitting on the opposite side of her bed, not touching her, mostly putting himself in Harry’s line of sight.

“Indefinitely,” Death says.

Harry’s lip trembles, and he sniffs back the tears that are forming behind his eyes, running down the back of his throat.

“I’m being cruel, keeping her like this, aren’t I?” he asks. Death doesn’t reply, so he continues. “You told me—you told me that I could stay your hand but that I may not be happy that I did. Is this what you meant? Keeping her soul locked in a body that no longer lives?”

“This is one way I meant,” Death replies, something like compassion in his voice. “You could also trap someone in a living body so frail that they have no quality of life to speak of.” He reaches out as if to caress her face but stops shy of touching her and pulls his hand back.

Harry grips Ginny’s hand more tightly, but he can hear the echo of her soul as it slams against her body like an errant porch door in a storm, unlatched, untethered, desperate to rip from its moorings. Tears slide down his cheeks.

“I don’t want her to die,” Harry chokes out.

“I know,” Death says.

“We-we’re wizards. We’re supposed to live to be over a hundred. She’s-she’s only sixty-five.”

“I know,” Death repeats, softer, sadder.

Harry holds Ginny’s hand to his forehead, her skin almost too cool to be living despite the blood flowing in her veins. “I’m not ready to let her go.”

“Then do not,” Death says. “You are the Master here. I abide by your command.”

The sob breaks free from Harry’s chest, and he gasps, trying to breathe around it as the tears fall harder and hotter. “Why couldn’t I be Master of Life!” he cries.

“Life has no master but herself, Harry Potter. My sister would never be so foolish as to give humanity a chance to have such power over her.”

Harry bites back his tears, kisses Ginny’s knuckles, then leans up and places a kiss on her forehead, stroking the still-vibrant red hair from her face. Only a couple strands of gray dare streak it, and she still could easily pass as a woman not much past thirty. She’s still beautiful. She’s far too young to be gone so soon.

She may be locked in her body, but she is gone.

“If I keep her here, what will happen to her?” Harry asks, voice croaking.

“Her soul will go mad. Sooner or later. She may refuse to cross, may haunt this plane until the end of all things comes.”

More tears fall, dropping onto Ginny’s cheeks, making her appear to be crying herself. Harry places a last, soft kiss on her lips, runs his hand down her hair a final time, then doing his best to memorize her face he says, “Release her.”

He doesn’t know if he actually speaks the words or not, if they are only in his mind or his heart, if his lips merely form them but no sound comes from his throat. It doesn’t matter; it’s enough.

Death reaches back out to her and runs a hand down her cheek. Harry feels like a breeze has rushed through the room, and he swears he feels a hand stroke his cheek, and then the sense of Ginny is gone, and so is Death. The surveillance charms sound the alarm and the mediwizards will pull him away, trying to bring her back. But there is nothing to bring back.

Harry watches numbly, tears continuing to fall from his eyes, though the sobs are strangely locked in his chest. He does not know when Death returns, but he leans into the specter, strangely surprised when it holds his weight, as the mediwizards confirm what Harry already knows.

She is gone.

* * *

Ginny was the first. She is not the last. Losing her seems to break something in Molly, and less than five years later, she passes as well. No one is surprised that Arthur is not long behind him.

Harry retires from the aurors and returns to Hogwarts, his first home, to teach. He’s been in the school a few times over the years, but returning this time, it feels different, the school feels different. He’s wandering the halls one evening, patrolling for students out late, and the echo of death hovers in a hall.

“As time passes and you are infused with more of my power, you can sense where I have walked more clearly,” Death says. He looks no different than when Harry first saw him over fifty years ago—still thin, still easily mistaken for a boy of no more than ten but possibly as old as fifteen. His hair still cascades around his shoulders like a cape, and his purple eyes are still like nothing Harry has ever seen.

“What am I sensing here?” Harry asks.

“You don’t remember?” Death asks, amused.

Harry frowns, then realizes where he is. “Bellatrix died here,” he says.

Death hums in reply. “And others. But I’m not surprised you remember her best.”

Touching the wall, there’s a spot that’s a little colder, a hair more chilled than the others, and Harry recognizes Death’s touch lingering there. “Why still?” he asks. “It’s been so long.”

“Just as some people leave more powerful marks in Life, there are some whose deaths leave marks on the world as well,” Death says. He reaches over and touches the spot that Harry is, and the wall gets colder. It’s almost like a pensieve, and Harry can hear Bellatrix’s laugh—a sound long forgotten—echoing, see her as if she is standing there, feel her madness, feels her surprise as she falls against the wall.

He pulls his hand back. “What was that?”

Death meets his eyes. “You are the Master of Death,” he says. “As such, you have a right to see anyone’s death if you so wish it.”

“I didn’t,” Harry snarls, stomping past.

He can feel the weight of Death’s gaze on him, but he doesn’t chase Harry, and Harry does not look back.

* * *

Bill is dead. It shouldn’t be a surprise that of the Weasley siblings, the first to go naturally would be the oldest, especially considering the harshness of his exposure to the werewolf curse. Fleur follows him shortly, her veela blood unable to continue on without its mate.

Wizards dying at barely a hundred… Harry shakes his head. It is not the way things should be. They should live longer, fuller lives. Harry is not ready to say goodbye. He does not have a choice.

Still, he starts feeling his immortality for the first time. He looks at his friends and his family, and even his kids. Just as Death predicted, his children are older in body than he is. Without the powerful glamours giving him the illusion of aging normally, his friends would have noticed long ago.

He is visiting Dumbledore’s grave a few weeks after Fleur’s funeral—something he’s taken to doing when he feels at loose ends over the years—when Hermione finds him.

Death is seated on Dumbledore’s tomb, as he usually is, disrespectful as always, but Harry is used to it. They hadn’t been speaking at least, and his presence had been oddly soothing. Death is the one thing in Harry’s life that is consistent at this point. He doesn’t stir or flee with Hermione’s arrival—there’s no need, after all, Harry is the only one who can see him.

“I thought I’d find you here,” Hermione says, sitting next to him without an invitation. Harry doesn’t turn to look at her, doesn’t want to see the gray that has mostly overtaken her hair, doesn’t want to see the lines on her face, the stretching and thinness of it that are the normal signs of age, even if they are less pronounced on her at over a hundred than they would be for a muggle woman in her sixties.

“You always know where to find me,” Harry says, and it’s true.

Hermione lays her head on his shoulder, and Harry puts an arm around her waist in return, comfortable in their long intimacy.

“Were you ever going to tell us that you kept the Elder Wand?” she asks.

The discussion is a long time in coming, and Harry is not at all surprised. It’s, honestly, a relief to admit to it to someone other than Death. “No,” he admits.

“Why didn’t you?” she asks, only curious, no judgment in her voice. There’s a nostalgic part of Harry that almost longs for her righteous certainty of old, but the adult part of him is just relieved she’s not angry. Before he can find the words she says, “Of course you couldn’t,” like it’s obvious. “You couldn’t risk telling any of us, so that we could never tell anyone else, intentionally or otherwise.” She chuffs, a self-deprecating sound, and adds, “And maybe you rightfully didn’t want to listen to me pontificate at you.”

Harry smiles despite himself. “All of the above?”

There’s a lull, a quiet between them, but it’s comfortable, easy. They’ve been friends for far too long to need to fill all the silences. 

“That’s not all there is to it, is it?” she asks. Unlike when they were teenagers or even in their twenties and thirties, there’s nothing pushy or demanding in her tone. Age and experience has polished Hermione into the extraordinary woman that Harry thinks she was always meant to be. She’s learned, through the years, to look at all sides before she speaks, to hear all arguments before making a judgment. It’s a skill that has served her well as Minister for Magic for the last twenty years.

“No,” Harry confirms.

“You’re not aging either,” she says, because along with learning to listen, Hermione has gotten far better at watching as well. In someone less principled than Hermione, the traits might be terrifying.

As it is, it’s Hermione, and Harry trusts her as much as he ever has. “No,” he says. “I’m not.”

“I feel like a fool for not seeing it sooner,” she says, a little rueful.

“This magic… it’s not like the magic we learned in school,” Harry tells her, relieved to speak of it to someone after carrying the secret for so long. “It’s powerful.”

She sighs against him. “If you were any less honorable, that power would be terrifying,” she tells him, and he laughs at the echo of his own thoughts.

“I could say the same for you,” he says.

She chuckles and accepts it. They fall quiet for a long moment. “Would giving the wand up change anything?” she asks.

“No,” Harry says, feeling the wand warm against his forearm where he usually has it holstered. “I am its Master. Giving that up isn’t a simple thing. It has to be taken.”

“As if any mere mortal could take anything from my Master,” Death says looking at them, amused.

Harry has long since given up arguing with Death over the title, but the impulse to refute it is still there. He can’t, unless he wants to explain more to Hermione than he already has, and he _really_ does not.

“You know what that means,” Hermione says softly, pulling Harry’s attention back to her. “If you’re not aging.”

He puts an arm around her shoulder and squeezes. “I know,” he says.

Her arm snakes around his waist, and she squeezes back. “I’m sorry.”

“There’s nothing to apologize for,” he tells her, then kisses the top of her head, breathing in the clean, honeyed scent of her curls, trying to commit it to memory. 

Ron finds them that way half an hour later. He says nothing, simply sits on Harry’s other side, reaching one of his still stupidly long arms across Harry’s shoulder to hug them both, and leans his head against Harry’s.

Between blinks, Death vanishes, and they stay there in silence until night falls.

* * *

Petunia and Vernon had passed years before, unremarked upon and little mourned. A heart attack had taken Dudley when he was only fifty-eight. Harry doesn’t want to say he mourned his cousin—they were never close, but when Dudley’s two children were magical, they had come to an uncomfortable truce. Harry is not close to his cousin’s children, though Dudley and his wife seemed to raise them to be better than he was raised. There are some wounds that do not heal, and though he eased the paths of Dahlia and Geoffrey as much as he could, they are not family, and they know him more as Harry Potter than an uncle.

The first unexpected death to shake Harry is thankfully not his, not any of his own children, but it is Penelope, one of Ron and Hermione’s granddaughters. She’s not even _young_ by muggle standards anymore, in her sixties when it comes, but it’s breast cancer, and an aggressive, malignant kind, and not even magic can combat all cancers.

It takes her within months.

Ron and Hermione are heartbroken, but Hugo and his wife are utterly despondent. Harry is family, and he’s known Penelope all her life—and she had been very close with her Great Aunt Ginny. In fact, she’d been very like Ginny, and Harry had stayed close with her after Ginny’s passing. Losing her is an unexpected blow, and it seems to be the first warning bells.

George’s son, Fred, dies two years later—he’s an auror, taken by a freak cursed object—and George takes his own life shortly after. Angelina will survive him by another thirty years, but she is never the same, and when she finally goes, it’s quietly in her sleep.

Draco Malfoy is the next, after Fred. Even after Voldemort’s death, they’ve found that the Dark Mark continues to have detrimental effects, and Voldemort stole years off his followers’ lives. Lucius is long gone—good riddance to bad rubbish, his son-in-law’s grandfather or no—but Narcissa doesn’t survive Draco’s death long. Harry has a lot of mixed emotions about Draco’s death. They were not friends, really, but through their sons, they were family. He’s also been a constant presence in Harry’s life since he was eleven, and he can’t help but feel that Draco’s passing is some greater signal.

The adults he had known as a child—what few remain—start dropping like flies.

Friends begin to follow in the next twenty years, and by the time Harry is approaching his 150th birthday, most everyone who was older than him is gone, and far too many of his peers are too.

Some of the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren have passed too. With each passing, Harry gets a little more numb to it, or so he thinks.

Then Ron passes.

And it turns out that Harry is not numb at all.

* * *

“You can’t have Hermione,” he tells Death, visiting Ron’s grave for the fifth time in as many nights.

Death is, as ever, perched disrespectfully on someone else’s tombstone, like the irreverent teen he appears to be. He tilts his head, and something about it feels like a challenge.

“Are you refusing your master?” Harry demands. He thinks it’s the first time he’s commanded Death since Ginny died, but he can’t do it anymore. He can’t lose anyone else.

“No,” Death says, no affront, not attitude. Harry wants to lash out and Death gives him nothing. “You are my Master. You alone command me. If you tell me to stay my hand from Hermione Weasley, then my hand is stayed.”

“And my children!” Harry adds. “And Rose, and Hugo—”

“And, and, and…” Death interrupts, soft, almost like a child’s singalong. “Do you wish me to stay my hand with everyone you know? With every life you interact with?” he asks.

“Yes!” Harry snaps. “Yes, I do!” He stares at Death, waiting, not sure for what, but he’s spoiling for a fight.

Death does not give it to him. “As you will it,” he says simply.

“What? You’re not going to lecture me about it? Not going to tell me why that’s a terrible idea?”

“I see no reason to tell you things you already know,” Death replies calmly, though Harry has the vague sense that he is irritated. “You are the Master here. I do as I’m commanded.” He bows his head and as a cloud passes in front of the moon, he disappears in the shadow it casts.

Harry yells out his frustration into the night, but he does not call Death back, and Death does not reappear.

* * *

Death takes him at his word. The world seems to decide to remind him that there are things worse than death.

* * *

Wizarding hospitals are not like muggle hospitals. Harry only lived in the muggle world for a decade, and yet, even after over a century of life, he feels like a hospital should be a sterile place, complete with the backdrop of beeping machines, which are both irritating for their constant droning, but also reassuring for their tangible reminder that someone is _alive, alive, alive._

Any sound would be better than the silent screaming and thrashing that Andromeda is doing behind powerful silencing spells.

“Is there anything you can do to help?” Teddy asks. He is old now; Andromeda is his great-granddaughter. Harry has been close to her. There are too many lines, too many children in too many generations for Harry to be close to them all, but there seems to be a child or two in every generation that Harry connects with more than others. Andromeda is one of them.

She reminds Harry so much of Tonks, it’s painful. She marches to the beat of her own drum, has a powerful sense of right and wrong, and had been set on being an auror since she understood what the word meant. The metamorphmagus gene had skipped her, but she delighted when her son showed it. She’s never disclosed the father, and Harry isn’t entirely sure she even _knows_ who he is, but she’s a wonderful mother, a beautiful woman, a beautiful soul, and one _fucking_ dark wizard who just _had_ to experiment with Death magic has destroyed her.

“I can try,” Harry says. The mediwizards and cursebreakers have done everything they can, which is not a lot, he’s afraid to say. He doesn’t know if Teddy suspects Harry’s connection with Death or if he just still has that almost-childlike belief in Harry’s power and ability to put right wrongs. He supposes it doesn’t matter; this is Death magic, and no one who can touch it the way he can. In fact, two other aurors had died trying to move Andromeda. No one else dares risk touching her, so she lies, thrashing, screaming her pain till she is hacking up blood, her throat is so raw.

“Anything you can do,” Teddy says, looking every inch his nearly 140 years. “Even if it just—” His voice catches in his throat, and his chin trembles. He swallows and forces himself to speak. “Even if it just… gives her peace.” He says the final words in a whisper, almost as if they’re too terrible to speak. “I’m going to—”

“Go,” Harry says. “Go to Orion. I’ll… I’ll do what I can.”

Teddy sees himself out, leaving Harry alone with a young woman who should by all rights be dead. The magic that keeps sparking over her body is the distinct poison green of Avada Kedavra.

Harry takes a deep breath and says, “You’re doing this on purpose.”

A shadow shifts and then the familiar form of Death steps out of it, looking far more solemn than Harry is used to seeing. “Oh no,” Death says. “You will not blame me for horrors of your doing.”

“Look at her!” Harry shouts.

“I don’t _have_ to look at her, Master. You’re mistaking me for Suffering. This is no doing of mine.”

“Tell me that’s not your magic tormenting her!”

“My power torments her _only_ because you have forced my hand!” Death shouts back, the first time he has ever raised his voice. “You are the one who told me _no one else_. No one you love can die. This!” He motions to where Andromeda is still writhing. “This is a consequence of _your_ actions!”

“You let that wizard research into your magic—you didn’t kill him, and so—”

Death laughs, and the sound sends a chill through Harry like he hasn’t felt since he was in that graveyard watching Voldemort rise from the dead. “There will always be humans who seek power over me. I am the great equalizer, the inexorable enemy. People will always seek to control me, seek to defeat me. You alone, Master, actually claim any power over me. _You alone_ have power over Death, and you do _not_ get to blame me for decisions you have made.”

Harry shakes his head. “You just want to teach me a lesson. First it was Jamie, now Andromeda.”

Purple eyes narrow. “Death is part of life. Sometimes I come in ignoble and mundane ways. What happened to the boy is simply nature. If you had bothered to try to understand me at all instead of assuming you understand what I am, you would know that I am not the one who cuts the threads. I am not the one who decides how long any life should be. I am simply the guide, the one that takes their hands as they leave this life.”

“Jamie is a child—he’s ten!”

“And he ran into a street carelessly, as many children do. Car accidents happen every day—”

“Not to wizarding children!”

Death gives him a flat look.

“He’s paralyzed from neck down. He’s in _hideous_ , continuous pain, and we can’t even give him anything for it, because it’s all phantom pains,” Harry snaps.

“Again, you have mistaken me for Suffering.”

“He is a child!”

“And I am not the one who decides when the strings are cut,” Death says, firm, but not without sympathy. “Death is a part of Life. I do not discriminate. I come for all when their threads are to be cut. Unless you command otherwise.”

Harry runs his hands through his hair, frustrated. “Is it wrong to want to protect my friends and family?” he asks.

“It is never wrong to love,” Death says, an odd tone in his voice. It’s as if he feels Harry has misunderstood something. “But I am not part of Life. My sister and I exist in balance. By wanting to protect those whom you love, you have tipped the balance.”

With a sigh, Harry steps over to Andromeda and puts his hands out over the death magic. He can feel it rub up against his touch like a cat welcoming home its master, and he calls to it. Under his hands, the poison green shifts until it’s purple, and then Harry calls it into himself. Calling away the death magic also breaks the silencing spell, leaving Andromeda coughing and gasping around her bleeding, raw throat.

“GG?” she asks, seeing him. Harry’s heart clenches at the familiar title—GG, for Great Grandfather—that most of his great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren call him. He kneels at her side, taking her hand.

“Hang on, Andy,” he tells her, stroking sweat-soaked hair away from her face. “We’ll get the mediwizards…”

But she’s shaking her head. “N-no,” she says around a cough that’s phlegm- and blood-filled. Her eyes, golden wolf’s eyes—the last legacy of Remus’s condition—fix on Death. “You—you’re…” She pauses to cough. “You’re here for me… r-right?”

She curls up as her body is wracked with harsh hacking, clear that her lungs have been severely compromised.

Harry turns to look at Death. “She’s alive,” he says, almost a protestation. “She can be healed!”

“It… hurts… G-GG…” she gasps at him, a hollow, terrible sound.

Softly, Death says, “Death magic is not a thing of healing. Magic can regrow bones, but it’s not as good at replacing organs.”

“P… please… GG…” Andromeda begs between gasps. “L-let… me—” She’s interrupted by a cough that sounds like she may be literally hacking up part of a lung. “Let me go…” she whispers.

“Andy…” Harry says, his own voice tight in his throat as he strokes her damp hair.

“P-please… GG…”

Harry closes his eyes, and tears he hadn’t noticed trickle down his cheeks. He has to try twice before he can force the word out. “Death?”

“Master?” he replies in a tone more that’s more query than answer.

It takes deep breaths and resolve, but he says, “My command… I lift it... When—” He has to sniff back tears running down his sinuses and tries to steady his voice while Andromeda continues her terrible, wet-sounding coughs. “When it’s someone’s time…” He can’t quite say it, so he tries again. “Take them when it’s their time.”

He expects Andromeda to still, that _terrible_ coughing to cease, but it doesn’t. After a minute, he turns and looks at Death.

“What are you waiting for?” he demands.

“Nothing,” Death says. “Her time came and has passed. It’s not for me to decide to take people on a whim.”

Harry stares in horror. “But she’s dying! She should be dead!”

“So she should,” he agrees. “But my time to take her has passed.”

In his grief, it takes far too long for Harry to understand what Death is waiting for. When he gets there, he meets Death’s eyes, and he sees the answer.

_You stayed my hand. You must now command it._

Harry doesn’t know if Death actually whispers the words into his mind or if it’s Harry’s own thoughts filling in the gaps, but he looks from Death to Andromeda back to Death, before lingering on Andromeda again. The coughing is not worse, but it is not better. Each wet rasp makes Harry’s chest ache in empathy. As Death said: magic can regrow bones, but organs are another matter, and Harry suspects there’s no healing the damage done to Andromeda’s.

None of that makes what he must do any easier.

“G… G…” Andromeda pleas between gasps.

He has caused her so much suffering with his selfishness already; he cannot continue to cause more. “Take her,” he chokes out. “As your Master, I command you!”

Death is suddenly at his side and brushes his hand over Andromeda’s cheek. “Come, child,” he says to her, and she gives a final, weak cough, then stills.

Harry feels the moment her soul leaves, and he is left alone to sob over her body. When the mediwizard comes by, they do not blame him for killing his beloved great-granddaughter. They are relieved that she is no longer suffering. Her parents feel the same. Her son is thirteen, and he doesn’t understand, not really, but he doesn’t blame Harry either.

They may not blame Harry, but Harry will always blame himself.

* * *

Jamie passes that night—complications from his broken back.

Harry does not know whether to thank or curse Death for that backhanded kindness, so he does neither.

* * *

Hermione is old, even for a witch, and has become frail. She doesn’t complain about how much pain she is always in, but the way she moves tells Harry that every movement aches. There have been more losses as well, and they make her older still.

“I miss Ron,” she tells him. Harry does too. It does not feel like it’s his right to miss him as much as Hermione does. It doesn’t feel right to miss him more than he misses Ginny. She may have been with him for a much shorter time, but she was his wife, the mother of his children. He should miss her more.

“I know,” he says, stroking her hand, feeling how thin the skin there is.

She turns to look at him, and even though her eyes are foggy with age, she sees right through him as she always has. “Are you going to just… keep getting older?” she asks. “Sooner or later, people will wonder.”

He knows, but he doesn’t know what to do about it.

“I can’t just abandon my family,” he says.

She sighs as though he’s one of her many, many grandchildren or great-grandchildren or even great-great-grandchildren, both fond and as if he’s said something silly. She turns her hand over to hold his. “You are not abandoning them. You are moving on to the next part of your life. I know behind that glamour of yours, you are still young. People have forgotten that face these days, replaced it with older versions.”

“I can’t just restart another life!” Harry protests.

She reaches out and strokes hair back from his forehead, then traces the shape of the lightning bolt scar that he’s pretty sure she can’t actually see anymore. “I see the toll it takes on you, each death. Each loss. Parents should not have to bury their children, and your children have all grown old.”

Flustered, Harry stands, pulling away from her. “So what? I—I just fuck off?”

“You fake your death and move on,” she tells him, ever patient. “Stop wasting energy on glamours and go live a life where no one knows who ‘Harry Potter’ is.”

He turns to stare at her. “You really mean it,” he realizes.

“Either that or tell the world you are immortal. People will come for you, come to test it. They will target your descendants, hoping to unlock the secrets. They will grow angry and resentful of your youth and good health while they age and sicken and die. Not all of them, but enough of them.”

Harry knows this. Hermione has hinted at such things in the past but never spoken of them so blatantly. When he feels for her life force, he can sense how thin the thread that tethers her to her body is. He wonders if she’s been holding on for him.

Heart in his throat, Harry says, “I’ll make plans.”

She smiles at him, a sad smile, then leans back. “I’m so tired these days,” she says. “Stoke the fire for me before you leave? Hard to believe they’re putting colonies into space, and yet there’s something about a fire in the hearth…”

He does as she asks. The house is full of the bustle that Harry has always associated with a Weasley house, even one Hermione kept. Children and grandchildren and greats have cycled in and out of her home perpetually while they work to make their way in life. Jillian—Rose’s great-granddaughter—her wife, Serenity, and their four children are here now as they work out plans of where they want to live next. Jillian takes more from the Lovegood side of the family than the Weasley side, but Serenity is grounded and firm, and he knows they’re there as much to care for Hermione and keep her company as to have a place to save money while they make plans.

They’re good, really. All of them. Oh, there have been a few rebels in the family trees, how could there not be? But no one has done anything truly terrible, no one is truly malicious. As far as Harry can judge, it seems that all they have raised and brought into this world have been good people.

It’s something to be proud of, that legacy.

Hermione has fallen asleep before he leaves. He pauses to place a kiss on her forehead, runs a hand over her short, thinned curls, and goes downstairs to let Serenity know he’s leaving.

He is not surprised to get the call the next morning. It does not mean he cries any less.

* * *

He stands before Ron and Hermione’s gravestones, missing them as though he is missing parts of himself.

“Why do you stalk the shadows?” Harry asks.

A shadow separates itself and Death stands before him for the first time since he took Andromeda.

“Because my Master has both called and did not wish to see me,” Death replies.

Harry wants to protest, but Death is right: Harry didn’t want to see him, but he needs to.

“Are you going to tell me my children are worried about how much time I spend in graveyards these days?”

Death doesn’t walk so much as drift to stand between their gravestones. Showing unusual restraint, he does not sit on them. “Such matters are things of Life,” he says. “But you don’t need to come to a graveyard to seek me, Master.”

Harry does know that. He’s seen Death wander in other places, but the graveyard always seems the most appropriate place to speak with him.

“I need to fake my death,” Harry says. “And I will need a convincing simulacrum to do it.”

Purple eyes watch him curiously. The last time Harry saw that color purple, it was in the death magic he removed from Andromeda. It’s both beautiful and terrible, and Harry hates and loves it in equal parts. “That is powerful magic.”

“I am powerful.”

Death smiles. “So you are.”

* * *

Harry Potter dies on March 11, After Colony 3.

The wizarding world mourns.

Hari Chandra thinks that India is a big enough place to get lost for a while.

* * *

The jungle cover is so dense that virtually no starlight filters down, and the moon is only a day or two from new anyway, so his fire is the only real light. It could be menacing, but both the darkness and the effusive sense of _Life_ all around are instead comforting.

“Does it bother you?” Harry asks as he plays with the flames idly. The temple ruins are so overgrown, Harry almost missed them entirely but for the old magic in the foundations of this place. There are lost magics here, and Harry intends to find them.

A shadow solidifies, and Death sits across the fire from him, lazy and comfortable, at complete ease with himself. It took Harry a very long time to be that comfortable in his own skin, but he supposes that Death has had a very long time indeed to get comfortable.

“Does what bother me?” Death asks, mouth pulling in a hint of a grin as usual. It seems as if Death is always ready to laugh, watches humanity through a filter of amusement. It’s occasionally irritating, that flippancy, but these days, Harry finds himself mirroring it more often than not.

“That I call on you so much? That I ask for your company?”

The fire reflects oddly in his eyes, turning purple as if they have captured the flame rather than reflect it, reminding Harry that Death may appear in human guise for him, but he is not human.

“Why should that bother me?” Death asks, cocking his head.

“I’m sure you have more important things to do than to entertain me,” Harry says.

Death hums. “It only took you two hundred years to notice?” he asks, but the grin has widened to an amused smile, and Harry doesn’t think he’s upset.

“I can be a little slow on the uptake,” Harry replies drolly.

Grinning, Death says, “I do not work alone, you know. I am charged with all who die, but I don’t have to personally take them all. And you are my Master, so your will and needs supersede my other responsibilities anyway.”

Harry still does not like when Death so carelessly names him _Master._ It has never truly been said with resentment or malice, but the title still, after so long, sits ill in Harry’s stomach. “Do you have a name?” he asks, changing the subject. He knows from experience that Death will only disclose so much of the nature of the universe and his own place within it. Then he laughs, realizing he’s known Death for over three hundred years and has never asked that question.

The question surprises a laugh from Death. “Humans and their obsession with _naming_ things. You do so love to label things, to put them in a box.”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” Harry points out.

Death shrugs. “I am Death,” he says. “Humans have given me many, many names, but no, I do not have a _true name._ Not in the way a human thinks of it at least.”

“Should I call you Hades then?”

Death makes a face that’s almost offended, and it makes Harry laugh. “Hades was the god of the dead,” Death says with exaggerated pretension. “ _Thanatos_ was the Greek god of death. Though I’m no more fond of that name than any other.”

“It seems rude to keep calling you Death.”

“You have done so for two hundred years. Why the sudden need?”

“Because we weren’t friends before,” Harry says, shrugging.

Something changes in Death’s demeanor, the flames in his eyes seem to surge. “Is that what we are?” he asks in a deceptively calm voice. “Friends?”

Harry takes a deep breath, aware that something is going on that he doesn’t understand. “I’d like to be,” he says. “If you would.”

Death watches him for a long moment, the sounds of the jungle and even the fire itself having gone eerily silent. Then, like the world has sighed in relief, the sound comes back and Death says, “I’ve never had a friend before. I think I’d like that.”

Relieved, Harry says, “You should think of a name I can call you.”

The amusement is back, and Death’s animated face twists in fond exasperation. “Why is this so important to you?”

Harry thinks about it for a moment because it _is_ important to him, and asking why is a fair question. “I guess it’s because…” he trails, trying to pick the right words for what he feels, but this was always Hermione’s area, not Harry’s, and he decides to charge in. “Death is the name of _what_ you are. I want a name for _who_ you are.”

Death blinks at him, surprised. For something that is not human, he seems to experience and convey human emotions well. “Who I am?” he asks, though more to himself than to Harry.

Letting him think, Harry continues to play with the fire, twisting it into recognizable shapes, almost like shadow puppets made of flame. The quiet is comfortable, and there is nothing in the jungle that is a threat to either of them.

When Harry is considering going to bed, Death speaks up. “Duo,” he says. Their eyes meet over the fire. “A name—to call me—if you must have one. Duo.”

Feeling like he’s just been given an immeasurable gift, Harry smiles in return. “All right then.”

They stay up a while longer, making shapes in the flames and the shadows they cast and saying nothing of consequence. When exhaustion finally calls Harry to his bed, he says, “Good night, Duo.”

Their eyes meet, and Harry thinks something had changed, but he has no idea what.

“Good night, Harry,” Duo replies.

The words hang in the air like a benediction, and Harry goes to bed lighter than he has in decades.

* * *

He does not return for his children’s funerals. Or their children’s. Pragmatically speaking, it wouldn’t do to have the ghost of Harry Potter show up at the funerals of his descendants. Emotionally speaking, Harry simply cannot stand to bury anyone else. Knowing that time has passed and they must be gone softens the blow. 

* * *

“I think I’d like to go to the colonies,” Harry tells Duo, staring up into the night sky. He’s in a desert this time. It’s amazing the civilizations that have been lost beneath sands. There is an _ancient_ magic here, too, sleeping but powerful. As much as civilization has grown, as widely as it has spread, there are still places that have been buried and forgotten in the world, and Harry finds those places irresistible.

“You can,” Duo says, watching Harry as Harry watches the sky. “Your magic will change though.”

That makes Harry turn his head and look at him. The curtain of hair is tied into a long braid, snaking its way across the sand. “How so?” he asks.

Duo hums, looking up as he thinks. “Most of the magics that wizards use are earth-based. In space, you’d have to pull from the void, the nothingness.” His gaze comes back to Harry. “You use my magic, so you shouldn’t have a hard time tapping into it, but it is different. Most wizards probably can’t do it at all, or it could drive them mad. Would probably drive most mad. The void is greater and more powerful than the earth, but the human mind historically doesn’t respond well to touching something that immense.”

Harry hums, turning back to look up at the sky, imaging the colonies up there that he can’t see. “Maybe later then,” he says.

When he’s explored more. When he’s bored. When he’s willing to take the risk.

There will be time.

* * *

The next 150-or-so years, Harry wanders, seeking forgotten places, adventuring, seeing new things, learning new languages, meeting new people. He avoids wizarding places for the better part of fifty years, but he finds lost temples and holy places in jungles and deserts alike. His power continues to grow as he embraces the death magic he has unique access to.

Under aliases and through partners, he publishes papers, invents new spells, takes some time in the muggle world acquainting himself with the technology, which has come so far, it makes his mind spin.

He likes people, but he rarely needs them, and in long weeks, months, and years exploring, he finds that when he needs companionship, Duo is all the comfort he needs. Even so, the years pull at his mind and grief is ever in his heart.

* * *

It’s the first time he’s been in England again in over a century, and the places he gravitates to first are the cemeteries. Godric’s Hollow first, then Ottery St. Catchpool for the Weasleys, then Hogwarts. Of course he has to stop at Hogwarts.

Dumbledore’s tomb is still pristine, magic probably keeping it from being grown over. The bench to sit by it is more run down. A wave of his hand has it put back to rights. He sits and begins to process.

There had been a lot more graves and a lot more names than he had expected. He’d taken a detour to Grimmauld Place to look over the family tree tapestry there. It’s huge, these days, but while tracing every single line he could remember, nearly every last one of them had end dates. He considers it a minor victory that no one has been blasted off, but it is minor. There are branches off for children he’s never met, who do not know him, who cannot know him. He feels very far away from them all indeed.

“You, there,” a woman’s voice echoes across the glen. “Who are you, and why are you trespassing here?”

Harry should put up a glamour, but he doesn’t. He is here, on the grounds of his first true home, at the tomb of a man who was both mentor and tormentor, a man who was great and flawed just as many great men before him. The magic of the land and the castle are so thick and powerful, Harry feels like he could reach out and begin to weave them into something new and brilliant.

He will not. He could reweave the wards here, but he won’t. They are strong, and he does not want to explain who he is or what he has done. They don’t need it anyway, not really. Additional layers have been laid down over the past century and a half, and they are powerful and beautiful. He could reweave them and make them different, but he’s not certain it would make them better.

“Declare yourself or I will have the wards remove you!” the woman announces, and Harry has to smile as she comes around his bench to stand before him.

“The wards will do nothing to me,” he tells Hermione Longbottom-Smythe as she stands before him. Though her voice is unquestionably the same as her many times great grandmother’s, she looks little like the woman Harry loved and remembers so well. Her hair has curls, but they’re the vibrant red of the Weasleys, the shape of her face takes more from the Lovegood genes than that Granger. Her eyes and her voice though—they are all Hermione. Harry assumes her intelligence is as well, seeing as she’s Hogwarts’ current headmistress. She was an infant when Harry left, but she gasps when she gets a good look at him.

“H-Harry Potter?” she asks, sounding afraid.

“Or perhaps just his ghost,” he tells her.

She holds her wand like she knows how to use it, but it’s little threat to Harry. The Elder wand still hums comfortably against his skin. He keeps it with him, but he doesn’t use it, for the most part—not unless he's doing complex spellcrafting, anyway.

“No… no, you’re him,” she says, lowering her wand, but it’s an intentional move, as if she’s forcing herself to do it. “My family… there’s a… a rumor, that you’re immortal. That what happened with Voldemort made you immortal. I guess it’s true.”

Harry has to smile at her, somehow not surprised that Hermione managed to share his secret with some of her family. Probably so he wouldn’t be alone if he decided to come back.

“Close enough,” he says. Hermione isn’t young—not as the headmistress of Hogwarts—but she’s still young _enough_ to be spry, and she plops to the ground like she’s a child in her surprise.

“Bloody hell, you really are him,” she says almost faintly.

He smiles at her, finding it impossible to imagine his Hermione reacting that way. “Guilty as charged.”

She takes several deep breaths, muttering under her breath, and he doesn’t bother trying to hear what she’s saying. Finally, she seems to collect herself. “So you’re really _the_ Harry Potter.” Her eyes take on a calculating look that does remind him very much of his Hermione, and not in a particularly good way. “Why are you here? Now?”

“Just… visiting old friends,” he says, motioning to Dumbledore’s tomb. “It’s been a long time since I’ve come to see them.”

“What have you been doing?” she asks.

“Anything I want to,” he tells her.

She looks oddly disappointed by the answer, but he sees no reason to give her more than that. She may be of Hermione and Neville and Luna and Weasley blood, but they are only pieces of her, parts of her, and she isn’t Harry’s—not anymore.

“If you don’t mind?” he says, motioning to the tomb.

She gets to her feet, managing to look as imperious and regal as a headmistress should in a few moments. Rather than turning to leave though, she stays, looking at Harry with those keen eyes. “I have… so many questions,” she admits.

Harry meets her gaze evenly. “And I have no answers I will give,” he says.

“Even if I asked you about Hermione? My namesake?” she asks. “I was only an infant when she died.”

“I know,” he says. “And you had a lot of family who were able to answer your questions about her.”

“Not like you could,” she says. “No one in my lifetime knew her as a child. Knew who she was as a young adult, as a young woman.”

“That may be true,” he replies. “But you are neither a child nor a young woman any longer, so seeking parallels and reflections with her younger self seems a bit immature.”

She looks hurt at that, and he sees bits of all of his friends, but wholes of none of them. It hurts, to have parts of them so close at hand yet so untouchable, and it makes him ache for them in ways he hasn’t in decades.

“Please, leave me,” he says.

She opens her mouth to protest, and Harry is done playing. He casts a wordless, wandless silencing charm, and she tries to speak, but no sound issues from her throat.

“Leave. The charm will wear off in half an hour. I am here to mourn and remember, and you have no place in either of those.”

Looking like she’d like to rain down a severe verbal thrashing, she raises her wand. Harry summons it from her hand with barely a thought. He imagines the headmaster’s office—or at least what it was when he last saw it. He touches Hogwarts’s power and _feels,_ maps the rooms with magic, forming a map in his mind, then banishes the wand to the Headmistress’s desk. She gapes at him when her wand vanishes.

“You will find your wand on your desk. Best go retrieve it,” he tells her.

She looks like she wants to protest, but her voice silenced and without her wand, she has little choice but to stomp back to the castle, leaving Harry in peace for at least a little bit.

He isn’t surprised when Duo appears and makes himself comfortable on Dumbledore’s tomb.

“Could I talk to him?” Harry asks.

“What would you have to ask?” Duo replies.

Harry shrugs. “I don’t know,” he admits. “I just… would like to talk to him.”

“I am the keeper of the Veil, but reaching beyond is… difficult. Those who have moved beyond should not be disturbed.”

“But you could do it?” Harry asks.

Duo makes a so-so motion with his hand. “I could try. But those who have moved on willingly are a lot harder to find. Of all people you could speak to, is he really the one you wish to most?”

“No,” Harry admits after a moment. “No, I just…” He sighs.

“I am always willing to listen,” Duo says, sympathetic.

Harry runs his hands over his face. “I want a new life. A new start.” He stares up at the clouded-over sky. “For a little while, at least, I want a clean slate.”

He can feel Duo’s gaze on him, feel its weight, but it’s a comfortable weight these days. “That’s a difficult proposition,” he says finally. “Do you mean to give me my Hallows or are you looking for something less permanent?”

Letting out a soft chuff, Harry says, “Something less permanent, I think. I don’t want to die, I just… want a break. Want some distance. I want to look at the world through clear eyes again.” He turns his gaze away from the sky and meets twilit eyes. “Will you help me?”

“I will do as my Master commands me,” Duo replies.

It’s not the answer Harry hoped for, but it’s good enough. He tugs at the warsd of Hogwarts and lets himself apparate through the opening he makes, closing it on the way through. He has work to do.

* * *

  
Harry prepares the final steps. This is something he can do, and only he can do, but he is sure it will work.

“So this spell will cast you into another body?” Duo asks, doubtful.

“It will cast my soul into a new body, yes,” Harry confirms. He hasn’t exactly hidden his plans from Duo, but he hasn’t been as transparent with him as he could have been.

“And what happens if someone finds my Hallows before you come back for them?” Duo asks.

“No one will find them. Barely anyone even knows their legends anymore,” Harry points out patiently.

Duo crosses his arms, irritated. “Barely anyone is still _someone_ ,” he says. “I’ve no desire to answer to another Master.”

“Good,” Harry tells him. “Because I wouldn’t want that either.”

“Do you really wish to be a child again?” Duo asks, as close to whining as Harry has ever heard him.

“I wish for a clearer view again. I wish to see things anew. I am too old to be learning new things readily.”

Duo does not look appeased, but Harry ignores him, setting the last crystal into place before sealing his tomb. His soul will leave this place, but his body never will.

“I do not like this, Master,” Duo tells him.

“I know,” he says, laying down. “That’s why I’m not asking.”

Duo shakes his head, but he comes to stand over Harry. He traces the pale—but still visible—lightning bolt scar, then runs a hand over Harry’s hair. His purple eyes are the last thing Harry sees before he closes his own and sinks into the spell.

* * *

Pain. Emptiness. Sorrow. Loneliness. Guilt. The mission.

“The only way to live a good life is to act on your emotions,” Odin tells him.

He doesn’t know what that means, but he is determined to find out.

* * *

Relena is in his sights, but Heero’s finger hesitates on the trigger. She reminds him of someone, though he can’t recall who. It’s not the blue eyes or the blond hair—no, it’s something in the direct challenge of her gaze, the way she silently dares him to pull the trigger.

Before he can quite make that decision, a gunshot breaks the night air, and his thigh explodes with pain—pain like he’s not sure he’s ever felt.

“You’re not hurt, are you, girlie?” a voice asks, and Heero _knows that voice._

He turns to look at the figure there, clad all in black, holding a gun steady on him. Even in the dark, his eyes seem to glow an almost supernatural purple from beneath the cap that shades them.

 _I know you_ , Heero thinks, but that simply cannot be possible.

Relena puts herself between them. Heero goes for his gun and is shot again.

There are the missiles, there is the explosion. Heero feels satisfied that his Gundam has been destroyed and it cannot be used to hurt anyone else.

As he falls into the water and blacks out, though, purple eyes are painted behind his eyelids.

* * *

The boy—Duo Maxwell—rescues Heero, has retrieved his Gundam. He displays a ready familiarity and comfort with Heero that he does not deserve, but Heero finds that he doesn’t mind. Being around Duo, for all his noise and chatter, is oddly soothing. It’s comfortable, like slipping into a well-worn sweater. He can’t explain it, but Duo looks at him with laughing, knowing eyes and never flinches when Heero is harsh.

Heero likes him, though he can’t explain why. It bothers him, so he takes the first opportunity to flee, borrowing parts from Duo’s Gundam to do so.

He thinks about how pissed off Duo will be when he finds what Heero has done.

The idea is strangely amusing, further proof that Heero needs to separate himself from the boy who didn’t hesitate to either shoot him or save him. They may be nominally on the same side of this war, but Heero can’t risk trusting him.

Not yet anyway.

* * *

He doesn’t know who kissed who. He knows they were arguing about something stupid, and then Duo was in his arms, their mouths sealed, and all Heero wants to do is press them together until they are practically a single person.

Duo does not object. He also has more practical experience. The first time is rough, hands grabbing too tight, teeth nipping too hard, gasping into one another’s mouths, staring into one another’s eyes.

Heero knows those eyes. He has seen them in his dreams all his life. It isn’t a matter of believing in signs or omens, but he knows, deep in the depths of his soul, that Duo is _his_.

Of everything Heero questions in his life, that is one thing that he does not.

Duo seems to agree, as instead of protesting, he curls himself around Heero, wrapping his arm around Heero’s waist, tangling their legs together, resting his head firmly on Heero’s chest.

_Mine._

It seems they share the sentiment.

* * *

Heero doesn’t die when he self-destructs. He’s surprised that he’s not really surprised by this fact. He shouldn’t have expected to survive self-destructing, but he realizes he kind of did. Despite caring nothing for whether or not he lives another day, he’s not surprised he didn’t die.

It takes frustratingly long to heal, but he does. He doesn’t even have any decent scars to show for his pain.

Something has changed though. Maybe it’s the self-destruction, maybe it’s being on Earth again, but the dreams begin. They’re just dreams that mean nothing and make no sense…

…Until they do.

* * *

Heero infiltrates the base where Duo is being held. It’s his job to eliminate the leak. There’s no question that Duo has been tortured; the commercials advertising his imminent execution make it clear that he has been. His face has been so badly beaten, it’s unrecognizable. Heero is sure that’s not the only harm that’s been done.

After all, if they beat up his face, they certainly wouldn’t have spared his body.

He pushes away a memory of Duo stretched out beneath him, of the surprisingly soft fingers on his back, the smooth skin under his fingers, the silken spill of hair over the sheets. Heero shoves them all away as he breaks into the cell holding Duo.

Duo looks better than he has any right to, but he’s in obvious pain as he pushes himself up the wall until he’s standing, ready to die at Heero’s hand, and all Heero can think is _why the play? Why the act? You know I can’t kill you, so why?_

The question Heero doesn’t ask is if _he can’t kill Duo_ or if Duo _can’t be killed_. In the end, it doesn’t really matter. He isn’t going to try to kill Duo Maxwell today.

For a moment, he swears he sees satisfaction in purple eyes that seem to glow.

His dreams have featured purple eyes.

 _Later,_ he tells himself. _Later, we’ll deal with all of this._

* * *

Later takes longer to come than Heero expects. Duo becomes his partner, his friend, his lover when they have moments to steal to live as much as they can.

The dreams get more vivid and pieces begin to come together, but Heero boxes them all away. They are in the midst of a great and terrible war, and it is one that needs Heero Yuy, not…

The name slips from his memory, and Heero slams the door closed on it.

 _After the war,_ he promises himself. It’s the first time he’s even consciously contemplated that there will be an _after_.

He catches Duo watching him sometimes, his gaze unreadable but familiar. More familiar than Heero feels it should be. A comfortable weight that Heero knows and has appreciated in the past.

_Later._

* * *

The war is won, somehow, by some miracle, and Heero has dreams to confront and answers to find.

It takes a couple months of searching, but he finally finds the cairn and breaks into it. Inside, he finds his old body, finds the Hallows, finds the answers to the questions the dreams have been raising.

He spends the rest of the year integrating the memories, figuring out who is Heero Yuy and who is Harry Potter, and who he is now, now that he is _both_.

The magic comes back to him as easily as breathing, and it is accompanied by new magics, magics of the void, the ones Duo had told him about all those years before. Being born in space has given him access to that magic, even here on Earth, but Heero looks forward to returning to space to see it in its glory.

* * *

His sojourn is interrupted by an uprising, only a year after the end of what they are now calling the "Eve War." Terrible though it was, the Eve War wasn’t long enough, wasn’t terrible enough to keep people from repeating their mistakes. Treize was too charismatic. He was probably not evil, but he was not good.

Heero is rather tired of cleaning up after megalomaniacs who are convinced that their way is the right way.

It does mean he gets to see Duo again, and this time, he knows what Duo is. They don’t have time to discuss it, but he sees the knowledge in Duo’s eyes, sees the recognition of not just Heero but Harry. He stays his tongue though, as he once stayed his hand, and waits for Heero to come to him.

Something in his eyes is eager, but he waits.

* * *

The battle is won, the attempted rebellion defeated, but Wing Zero is broken beyond repair. It only made it through re-entry because of Heero’s void magic, if he’s honest, and even then, it was a close thing.

The void magic is as immense and powerful as Duo once promised, and Heero thinks he now knows why Duo’s stealth “technology” is impossible to replicate.

He is on Earth, and Duo is in the colonies.

Heero intends to rectify that. As soon as he wakes up.

* * *

It takes Heero two days to awaken, and more time wasted before he finally just apparates out of the hospital. He makes a single stop, then goes to the nearest graveyard he can find. He makes his way into the depths of it where they’re unlikely to be seen as the moon rises on its final wane above him. Heero calls the Elder Wand to his hand. It is a part of him once again, not a thing that can be taken from him. He almost pities anyone who tries. Once, Harry Potter would have hesitated to kill them. He does not think, since being Heero Yuy, that he will hesitate nearly so much in the future.

“Duo,” he calls into the night, not loudly. There’s no need to be loud. He is the Master of Death, and Death will hear him wherever he calls.

A shadow becomes a familiar shape, and Duo stands before him, clothed in shadows that seem more like smoke. His hair is a cascade, freed from its usual braid, and his eyes are the backlit purple of death magic.

“So you remember,” Duo says, grinning as ever, as if he’s laughing at a joke that only he can hear. “You do know you don’t need to be in a graveyard to summon me.”

“I thought we should keep to tradition,” Heero replies.

Duo’s eyes drift down to the Elder Wand in Heero’s hand, curious, perhaps a little covetous, but almost as if the desire is habit more than true want. “You remember and you have summoned me,” Duo says. “What can I do to serve you, Master?”

Heero steps forward and puts a hand on Duo’s hip. The smoky robes feel like nothing at all, perhaps the air is a few degrees cooler where they are, but nothing more substantial. He wonders why he doesn’t remember seeing them before, but that’s a question to answer later.

With his other hand, he cups Duo’s face. “Is this all right?” he asks, because he needs to ask. He is Duo’s Master, and whether he knew it at the time, he knows it now. He must ask.

Leaning up and forward, Duo kisses him softly. “You are mine,” he says, the words tickling across Heero’s lips because of how close he stays. “And I have only ever been and will only ever be yours.” He closes the distance, and Heero takes over the kiss, apparating them to the hotel room he sat up earlier in hopes of this.

Duo laughs as they land on the bed, and Heero relishes the almost-forgotten sound. The filmy garment vanishes, leaving Duo bare to him, and he lays back on the bed in open invitation, watching Heero with hungry, laughing eyes.

Their fingers tangle, and Duo says, “My Master.”

It is permission, invitation, plea, statement, and blessing all in one. Heero is powerless to resist.

* * *

“You knew it was me as soon as you saw me on that boat,” Heero says, trailing his fingers lazily down Duo’s bare back.

“Of course I did,” Duo replies, head pillowed on his arms, lids heavy with laziness and satisfaction. “I couldn’t find you before then—as Master of Death, you alone are hidden from me until you call me—but you started calling.”

“I did?”

Duo hums an affirmative. “A few days before. Not… summoning me, but seeking me. Enough for me to find you. It’s not an accident that I was there.”

“Seeking you?” Heero asks.

“You did something—something you expected to kill you, something you hoped would,” Duo says, his voice going soft and sad. “It wasn’t… conscious enough to summon me to you, but it was enough to point me in the right direction.”

Heero remembers being on the beach and hitting the self-destruct on his suit after Relena saw his face. He remembered a vague sense of relief that he wasn’t going to have to be in this war, that he wasn’t going to have to kill any more little girls, wasn’t going to have to bury any more of their puppies. Duo isn’t wrong that he wanted it over. It’s hard to remember being so immersed in that teenage desperation now. It’s truly astonishing how even for a child like Heero was, it felt like everything was the end of the world, how narrowly focused his perspective was.

Shaking his head, he strokes his fingers back down Duo’s back. “How long were you going to wait to tell me who I am?” he asks.

“I knew you’d remember,” Duo says. “Your spellcraft was very refined, at the end. You wanted a fresh start, but if you never remembered, then it would be like dying for real. You were tired and heartsick, but even then, you didn’t want to die. I knew all I had to do was wait.”

“And hide,” Heero says, almost accusing. He can’t help but be irritated by the fact that he honestly thought Duo could die during the war.

“I never lied to you,” Duo says, watching him with eyes too purple to be human. Heero wonders why he didn’t see it before. “I told you I don’t tell lies. Yet, somehow, no one ever believes me when I tell them I’m Death.” An amused grin curls the corner of his mouth.

“You knew who I was when we first met.”

Duo closes his eyes and hums. “Of course I did. You’re my Master.”

Heero’s hand stills, and Duo opens a curious eye. “Am I? Still?” he asks, despite what Duo has told him.

Both eyes open, and the amusement has been replaced by seriousness as he props himself up by his elbows. “No matter what face you wear or name you claim—” He reaches out with one hand to cup Heero’s face. “—you are my Master.”

Leaning into his hand—which should be rough and callused from a rough life, but isn’t—Heero has to ask again, “Are you really okay with that?”

“With what?”

“Me being your Master? Being involved with me like this?”

Duo’s eyes soften, a warmth coming into them Heero doesn’t think he’s ever seen. “Silly, Master,” he says, his voice thick with affection. “Do you have any idea how long I’ve loved you?”

“Have you now?” Heero asks, warmth building in his chest.

“I have.”

Heero pulls Duo’s hand off his face and kisses his wrist. “I won’t lose you?”

Sorrow dims Duo’s eyes, and Heero almost takes the question back, but he needs to know. “One day, you will decide you have tired of this world, and when that day comes, you will give me my Hallows back, and I will reap you. One day, I will lose you. But no, you will never lose me. I am Death. I am not a changeable thing, and neither is my heart. It is yours, as am I.”

“And as long as I live, I’d like to be with you,” Heero assures, leaning in to kiss Duo again. Duo kisses him back, opening to him as if there is nothing simpler or more right in the world.

Maybe there isn’t.

**Author's Note:**

> My first experiment in minimal tagging. The one thing that really worried me was the kid deaths, even if they're OCs, but I _really_ just wanted this to read with as few spoilers as possible. 
> 
> I hope you enjoyed! I'd especially love any feedback you'd like to share about reading it mostly tag-free, if you enjoyed it, predicted the way it went. I'm really, really pleased with this one, so I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I loved writing it.


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